The clock chimed the quarter before midday. Uncomfortably aware of dinner swallowed too fast, Charles was alone in his rooms, wiping a linen towel over his face and hands and doing what he could to tame his hair, which curled like young vines in the humid warmth.
The morning had been all too short. Ignoring the courtyard chaos of students and faculty practicing for the Siamese reception ceremony, Charles and Pere Jouvancy had checked and rechecked props, costumes, and the slowly drying paint on the Hydra’s patch. As Charles went back and forth from stage to understage, he’d seen that Pernelle was holding her own acting the awkward boy quick to learn in spite of his muteness. To his relief, Frere Moulin had been nowhere in sight.
The only news from Lieutenant-General La Reynie was that his kitchen maid spy at the Hotel de Guise had heard a woman screaming somewhere in the house. And that Fabre, still held at the college in close confinement, was now refusing to speak to anyone.
Charles pulled his wrinkled shirt down smoothly over his black calecons, his knee-length underpants. Today he wouldn’t be teaching and demonstrating, so he had no reason to wear breeches. Just as well in the heat, he thought, taking the tight-across-the-shoulders cassock the clothing master had given him from the hanging rail. He pulled it on, tied the cincture, made sure his rosary hung straight down, and put on the three-pronged formal hat. His mouth was as dry as an over-roasted turkey, the way it used to be when he performed as a student. Terpsichore, St. Genesius, St. Vitus, he prayed, give wings to the dancers’ feet. Make the actors’ words stick to their memories like Paris mud. Don’t let the giants fall off the ladder. Whisper “right” and “left” in Armand Beauclaire’s ear. The clock chimed twelve. At a quarter past, the Siamese were coming. Charles hastened downstairs.
It was a little cooler than yesterday and less humid, and the awning made a pleasant shade. A breeze fluttered around its edges and rippled the stage curtain into a blue velvet lake. Lay brothers were making a last check of the benches and straightening the rows. Nearly all the windows below the awning and with views of the stage were open. The women in the audience would sit there, as though in box seats. Straight across from the stage, the third-floor windows of the little salon, where Charles had stood before daylight, were hung with swags of red drapery and three high-backed armchairs were drawn close to the sills. The Siamese would sit there, with a perfect view of the stage and high enough above the crowd to satisfy their notions of honor. In Siam, Jouvancy had said, honor meant being placed well above the ground and social inferiors. The ambassadors’ letter from King Narai to King Louis, treated as if it were Narai himself, had apparently created endless confusion on the journey from the coast to Paris, since no one could be housed higher than the room where the letter lay in its elaborate casket.
In the center aisle between the benches, the student linguists were gathering to welcome the ambassadors in twenty-four languages. Their scholars’ gowns had been brushed, their hair was unnaturally neat, and their hands had been scrubbed. The inseparable pair of twelve-year-old Chinese boys stood a little apart, black eyes flashing as they talked excitedly and pointed at the red-draped windows. Pere Montville, the ceremony’s director, burst out of the main building, slammed the door behind him, and was nearly flattened as an allegorical emblem the size of a small table crashed to the ground.
“Help!” he yelled to the lay brothers. “You have ten minutes to get that back in place.” He rolled his eyes at Charles, who had come running. “We’ll get through it. We always do. And tomorrow we’ll be looking forward to next year. That’s because we’re insane, and you seem to fit right in, Maitre. Bonne chance this afternoon!”
The clock chimed a quarter past twelve.
“Ah, mon Dieu,” Montville implored, casting his eyes up at the canvas awning. He bore down on the linguists. “Form up in your line and stay there!”
He hurtled back through the rear door, Charles on his heels. When they reached the grand salon, Montville made his way through the crowd of excited Jesuits to stand on the rector’s left, under the archway between the salon and the antechamber. The king’s confessor, Pere La Chaise, stood on the rector’s other side. Charles slid along the salon wall and worked his way to a vantage point behind La Chaise’s right shoulder. A strip of thick carpet patterned in red and gold ran from the rector’s feet across the antechamber’s patterned stone floor to the street doors. The college’s most noble students, dressed in satin and lace under their scholar’s gowns, were ranged along both sides of the carpet, fidgeting and whispering. The five boys nearest the double doors-the natural son of the late Charles II of England, and the sons of the Grand Generals of Poland and Lithuania-had lent their personal carriages to bring the Siamese from Berny, two leagues south of Paris, and would escort the ambassadors into the college. Le Picart clapped his hands to call everyone’s attention.
“Remember,” he said sternly, “this visit is supposed to be incognito, since the ambassadors have not yet made their formal entry into the city. We do not want to draw a crowd, so you must get them out of the carriages and inside as quickly as courtesy allows. Do not let them stand in the street and look at everything. The music should help to draw them. I hope.”
The muted sound of slowing horses and carriage wheels drew all eyes to the doors. The boys stood like statues, in perfect fourth positions. Le Picart signaled the trumpeters hidden in a side alcove and a deafening processional made Charles flinch. Two lay brothers opened the great double doors. Charles II’s son, eleven-year-old Charles Lennox, swept through them and opened the door of the first carriage, which had his coat of arms blazoned on it. He bowed deeply as the chief ambassador, Kosa Pan, descended from the carriage. The ambassador was resplendent in a long-sleeved tunic, curiously draped breeches, and a tall, narrow hat with a small brim, all of heavy gold silk covered with intricate gold stitching. His brilliant black eyes darted everywhere with lively curiosity, but he meekly allowed young Lennox to lead him inside. His two attendant Siamese nobles and M. Torf, a Frenchman who had accompanied the entourage from Siam, followed them. Kosa Pan bowed to Le Picart and the attendant nobles knelt with their noses in the carpet and their silk-clad rumps in the air. Before the desperately straight-faced students could give way to giggles, a new trumpet blast announced the next carriage.
In spite of Lennox’s efficiency with Kosa Pan, an excited crowd was gathering in the street. Elbowing each other, they watched the other two ambassadors, a glum elderly man in blue silk embroidered with gold flowers and a young man in green silk and a fur-trimmed hat, alight from the carriages. As the last of the entourage trailed through the college doors, there was a pause in the music and a child’s piercing treble voice rose from the crowd.
“Maman, they are just like monkeys!”
The great double doors swung shut. Charles hoped the Siamese didn’t have enough French to understand the remark, but Kosa Pan’s dancing eyes and brief snort of tolerant laughter told him otherwise. As the ambassadors’ servants began laying brocade-wrapped gifts at the rector’s feet, Charles faded back along the salon wall and retreated to the courtyard.
Half the linguists had abandoned their line and most had their gowns nearly off their shoulders. Charles chivvied them back into order just as Montville and two of the trumpeters emerged into the court and placed themselves below the red-draped upper windows, facing the long line of students. A blasting fanfare from the third-floor salon, answered by the courtyard trumpeters, signaled that the ambassadors had reached their red armchairs. The first linguist stepped smoothly forward. He bowed to the open windows, delivered greetings in French, bowed again, and exited around the outside of the benches. The second boy welcomed the guests in Siamese, and if his pronunciation made the ambassadorial mouths quiver, it also brought wide, appreciative smiles for the effort. Twenty more languages followed and finally the Chinese boys advanced, red silk flashing under their gowns. They delivered a brief antiphonal Chinese oration, expressing the college’s joy in welcoming honored Mandarins from the East.
They withdrew and a longer fanfare announced Pere La Chaise, escorting the king’s German sister-in-law Liselotte, Madame, as she was styled by her royal title. She and her bevy of ladies acknowledged the ambassadors, who rose and bowed in return. Then Madame was shown to the middle chair of three upholstered in blue cut velvet, set between the benches and the stage. As she arranged her billowing lemon satin skirts around her, Pere La Chaise sat down on her right. Her ladies claimed the first bench, their white linen headdresses, called fontanges, standing up on their ringleted heads like half-folded fans.
The other benches began to fill, as the boarding students not in the performance took their places. Charles saw Pere Montville showing the Mercure editor to a good place near the front, and Beauchamps and the musicians emerged from the senior refectory, their tiring room, and arranged their music on stands. The mothers, aunts, and sisters of the students filled the windows, their jewels and gowns gleaming even in the subdued light, and their men, equally dazzling, flowed into the courtyard. Members of religious orders began arriving in a flood of black, brown, and white: Augustinians, Cordeliers, Carmelites, Jacobins, and Celestines.
With a last look at his audience, Charles slipped through the door to the understage, where Pernelle, cheeks flushed with excitement, stood beside her assigned gear wheel. The flirtatious Frere Moulin was still not in evidence, and the other brothers were too busy to pay her any attention. Charles smiled at her and went up through the trap and through the rhetoric classroom windows into a simmer of anticipation. Pale under their makeup, boys were dressing, muttering lines, practicing steps, and discovering that, once dressed, their churning insides needed the latrine. Pere Jouvancy, calm and eagle-eyed, was everywhere at once. The clock chimed the quarter before one, preliminary music began in the courtyard, and a hush descended on the classroom.
“A good time to pray, messieurs,” Jouvancy said to the students happily. “Keep your headdresses on, God will understand.”
They gathered around him. Jacques Doute bowed his head, closed his eyes, and fell over his feet. Charles caught him and murmured, “Good, you got that over with in here.”
Jouvancy glanced sideways at them. “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “you took a body like ours, and our bodies are glorified in You. Please make us all, actors and their words, dancers and their movements, musicians and their music, stagehands and their work, instruments of Your truth. Let all we have made together be to Your glory.” He paused. “And, dear Lord, extra courage wouldn’t come amiss.” The “amen” was full-throated and garnished with laughter. Clovis’s opening actors scrambled for last sips of water, smoothed tunics and straightened helmets, and streamed through the windows to their places. Charles followed and settled himself and his thumping heart in the prompter’s wing.
The overture ended and Jacques Doute, blessedly sure-footed and commanding, spoke his prologue. Two lay brothers Charles didn’t know drew the curtains apart and revealed the shadowy green forest, and the stage magic began to work its will. The audience grew quiet and attentive, as though the tragedy’s sonorous Latin cast a beneficent spell. The robust swordplay drew cheers. Roars of laughter greeted the antics of comic characters. And if the tragedy cast a spell, the ballet wove a deep enchantment. The Siamese, who had watched the tragedy in polite bewilderment, came alive when the dancers appeared. Crowded close to the windows, they laughed and pointed and applauded.
When Hercules and his suite celebrated winning the Hesperides with a gravely joyous minuet, in a garden of golden fruit under a pink and gold and purple sunset, the audience breathed a collective sigh of contented wonder. Disaster threatened briefly when Armand Beauclaire went beautifully right, instead of correctly left. But, to Charles’s amazement, Beauclaire realized his mistake and pirouetted smoothly out of harm’s way. When the treasure-hunting Argonauts sailed their ship across the stage, the sea of billowing blue ribbons was so realistic that Charles saw a face or two in the audience turn faintly green. When the big-headed giants tried to scale heaven and fell thudding back to earth, even severe Carmelites held their sides laughing.
Holding his three-foot hourglass, Walter Connor danced Time’s sarabande with majestic menace. As the sparkling sands of time and life drained visibly away, people blanched and shrank back in their seats. As Hercules slew the smoke-breathing Hydra, the audience leapt to its feet, applauding and cheering. Even the sober-faced German Madame smiled and nodded happily as the red smoke drifted over her head.
And when the exuberant Ballet General began, Charles was half afraid the audience would surge onto the stage and join in. Hercules’s long chaconne was a tour de force. Applause drowned the creaking of his pink cloud as Diogenes-Pere Montville-wobbled to earth. Holding his lantern high, he brought the students receiving prizes onto the stage. To Charles’s delight, Antoine Doute won the lower grammar class’s prize, a fat Latin tome that he hugged proudly to his skinny chest. Finally, the trumpets accompanied Madame and her ladies from the courtyard and the Siamese down from their aerie. Royalty, ambassadors, and nobles went to the reception in the fathers’ refectory, and the cast and less exalted remainder of the audience surged together, hugging, kissing, bragging, and congratulating.
Giddy with relief, flooded with happiness at the beauty he’d helped to make, and moist-eyed with pride at the students’ achievement, Charles gave-and received-exuberant congratulations. Mme LeClerc made her way toward the stage, holding Marie-Ange and Antoine both firmly by the hand, and Charles jumped to the ground to greet her. He congratulated Antoine on his prize and both children forgot their manners and hugged him. Mme LeClerc was so excited that she forgot to reprove them.
“Your show was miraculous,” she cried, throwing up her hands. “The saints must be dancing in heaven!” Under cover of giving him a smacking kiss on the cheek, she said in his ear, “Is Mademoiselle Pernelle all right, is she with you?”
He jerked his head at the stage. “Below. All is well, madame. After you sent her to me, did the police return?”
“No, thank the Virgin! She can come back to us, if you think it’s safe.”
Charles hesitated. “I-no, she’ll be leaving soon.” Though how, he still had no idea.
Seeing Pere Jouvancy and Maitre Beauchamps bearing down on Charles, Mme LeClerc curtsied and took the children’s hands to steer them through the crowd. Jouvancy stopped to congratulate his nephew and speak briefly with Mme LeClerc. Then he and Beauchamps rained praise on Charles, who shoved away his worry about Pernelle and praised them fulsomely in return. The three of them linked arms and went to make their appearance at the rector’s reception, feeling like heroes indeed.
But before they reached the fathers’ refectory, Lieutenant-General La Reynie appeared seemingly from nowhere, detached Charles from Jouvancy and Beauchamps, and drew him into an empty antechamber.
“I didn’t see you in the audience,” Charles said pleasantly, but his stomach lurched at the lieutenant-general’s expression.
“I was at the Hotel de Guise-outside with the two men I’ve set to watch. The Duchesse de Guise is seeing no one and the footman who answers the door insists that Pere Guise is not there and that no one there knows where he is. The only way I can get in without bringing more trouble on myself than I want is with an order from the king. Which I doubt he would give me against a Guise, with only the evidence that I have.”
“What will you do next?” Charles said.
La Reynie glared at Charles. “I came here to take Frere Fabre into custody, but Pere Le Picart will not give him up. I will not force him in the presence of his guests. But tomorrow I will have Fabre, one way or the other. And you will help me get him, if it comes to that. I want an end to this.”
“He may not be guilty-”
“I will have him, and find out whether or not he is guilty. You are still my fly here, Maitre du Luc. Hear me. If Fabre conveniently flits as the other two did, you and you alone will answer for it. Your ballet is over, get back to work. Convince your rector that if he doesn’t want scandal, he’d better give me his prisoner.”
He stalked away, leaving Charles fallen from the heights of his triumph to cold, hard earth.